Your top 10 favorite Excel posts of 2012

There’s an Excel community out there that continually wants to learn new tricks, and there are lots of people just discovering Excel’s capabilities who want to join in. The most popular posts of 2012 that were about the current version of Excel reflect that mixed audience.

But the popularity ranking of posts about the new Excel reflects the enthusiasms of Excel professionals and geeks. They want to know how the new version will make their lives and jobs easier, especially those features that you let you work from anywhere.

Top 5 posts about the new Excel

Introducing Excel 2013Excel has a wealth of capabilities, so sometimes it’s easy to feel intimidated by all of the options. One big priority was to make the overall experience cleaner so you can take advantage of Excel’s power: charts that make your data look great; more advanced, integrated business intelligence; access to Excel from anywhere; and the new Office application model.

Introduction to the Data Model and Relationships in Excel 2013Excel’s new Data Model and Relationships features will hopefully change the way you use Excel for data analysis forever. So says Diego Oppenheimer, Microsoft Excel expert and popular blogger. He gives you a tour of the Data Model by showing you how he took advantage of it to shop for a new home.

Flash FillMaybe it’s the simple name that makes people curious:Flash Fill. And its simplicity is an accurate representation of what it does-streamlines data extraction and manipulation. With Flash Fill, you can toss out formulas. Really. It actually generates a program, based on the inputs you give it, that is optimal for your data requirements. Read this post to see how.

Top 5 posts about the current Excel

Using multiple criteria in Excel Lookup formulasWant to move beyond your plain vanilla VLOOKUP skills? This post shows you how to look up a value in a table using more than one criteria. By the way: There are multiple ways to use multiple criteria. (This post is written by JP Pinto, the winner of the Great White Shark Award given for the best article written about VLOOKUP during VLOOKUP Week.)

Tip: Add a watermark to an Excel worksheetNeed to keep a budget secret until it has been approved by the higher-up’s? This post walks you through adding a watermark, such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL to a spreadsheet. (Includes sample watermarks.)

Our eight best tutorials on Excel chartsExcel excels at crunching numbers, but it also helps you present them visually. These eight posts will show you how to create charts that make it easy to understand large quantities of data and the relationships among data. (Includes posts for beginner and advanced users.)

I have some graphics done using directx 11. Please can you suggest the best way to incorporate these into a spreadsheet so that when I save the spreadsheet the graphics save with it. N.B I am ultimately aiming to have values in the spreadsheet drive my graphics, so I need it to be dynamic not static. Thanks